Hello and welcome to my blog. There's lots said about why climate change now confronts us, and what it means, but the real issue is what to do about it. Plenty is said about that too, but there's not enough discussion on the practical aspects of implementation. Focusing on energy, that's what my blog sets out to achieve.

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I have always worked in the energy sector and have had a long-term interest in environmental issues. My earliest foray into "journalism" was an article in our school science magazine...

The Global Status of CCS

The Global Carbon Capture and Storage Institute has just released its 2012 report on the current status of CCS around the world. The headline is that CCS is clearly up and running and CO2 is being sequestered. Around the world, eight large-scale CCS projects are storing about 23 million tonnes of CO2 each year. With a further eight projects currently under construction (including two in the electricity generation sector), that figure will increase to over 36 million tonnes of CO2 a year by 2015. This is approximately 70 per cent of the IEA’s target for mitigation activities by CCS by 2015.

The flip side of this is that the rate of deployment is far below anything that remotely passes for a 2°C trajectory. The report finds that in order to maintain the path to the 2°C target, the number of operational projects must increase to around 130 by 2020, from the 16 currently in operation or under construction. Such an outcome looks very unlikely as only 51 of the 59 remaining projects captured in the Global CCS Institute’s annual project survey plan to be operational by 2020, and inevitably some of these will not proceed.

I have discussed CCS many times in the past. Given the continued abundance of fossil resources, their ease of use for both mobile and stationary energy generation, combined with the fact that they continue to be very cost competitive as new extraction technologies are introduced, it is therefore highly likely that we continue to make use of them. But as the report notes, we need to limit the increase in the stock of CO2 in the atmosphere to 1000 Gt this century (giving a 50 per cent chance of limiting global temperature rise to 2°C) which in turn requires energy-related CO2 emissions to fall to zero by 2075. The only way to square this circle will be large scale deployment of CCS.

One of the surprising aspects of the report is the review of where CCS is actually happening. Conventional wisdom says the EU then North America and that is certainly true for many of the more advanced projects, but close behind is China which has a number of projects in the identification stage of development. In fact the report finds that more than half of all newly-identified projects are located there. Using CO2 for Enhanced Oil Recovery (EOR) is being investigated as a revenue option in all the projects.

Daqing Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project (Identify stage) – a super-critical coal-fired power plant that would capture around 1 Mtpa of CO2 through oxyfuel combustion, developed by the China Datang Group in partnership with Alstom.

Dongying Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Project (Identify stage) – a new build coal-fired power generation plant with a planned capture capacity of 1 Mtpa of CO2, also developed by the China Datang Group.

Shanxi International Energy Group CCUS Project (Identify stage) – a new, super-critical coal-fired power plant with oxyfuel combustion being developed in partnership with Air Products, with a capture capacity of more than 2 Mtpa of CO2.

Jilin Oil Field EOR Project (Phase 2) (Identify stage) – EOR operations at the Jilin oil field, where around 200,000 tpa of CO2 from a natural gas processing plant are currently being injected, are scheduled to be expanded to more than 800,000 tpa from 2015.

Shen Hua Ningxia Coal to Liquid Plant Project (Identify stage) – a new build coal-to-liquids (CTL) facility developed that would capture around 2 Mtpa of CO2.

Perhaps the most disappointing news comes from Europe, where the value of the main CCS capital support mechanism has been reduced to a fraction of its anticipated amount following the collapse of the EU carbon market to some €8 per tonne of CO2. The EC policy objective of having up to 12 commercial-scale demonstration plants operating in Europe by 2015 is no longer achievable, with 4–5 projects operating in the next 5–6 years being a more realistic scenario. I commented on this back in June.

As well as giving a comprehensive breakdown of all the current projects, the report does the same for policy development, support mechanisms, storage potential and the progress in the technology itself. If you want to know more about CCS then this is truly a “one stop shop”.

The report download page with laptop, iPad and Kindle versions can be found here. Alternatively, you can go directly to the PDF version here.

Comment (1)

Comment on this blog

1. Jiri, 14th October 2012 3:45 pm

Nice document indeed. It all depends on consumers willing to pay for this. They don’t mind paying huge taxes on petrol and diesel yet. But this tax along with huge deficits are used to pay for social security. I’m not under illusion that people will be willing to pay carbon tax which will go to the energy producers. Especially when the time is almost up for rolling debt. I think that investors are aware of this. They want to see hard cash from government before they commit to some serious CCS project. Governments don’t have much money so you came with idea to bypass them and collect carbon money from consumers via carbon market. However this wont be stable environment. We are living in highly unstable political time. You won’t get golden feed in tariff on carbon again.